At six years of age, for a few weeks in the fall of 1815, in the town of Knob Creek, Hardin County, Kentucky, the boy went to his first school, taught by a typical frontier teacher commissioned by local parents to provide children with basic skills and only sufficiently knowledgeable himself to rise modestly above that level. Teachers were in short supply on the frontier that ran along the western ridge of the Appalachians; beyond was the sparsely settled western portion of Ohio and the territories of Indiana and Illinois; southward, much of the states of Kentucky and Tennessee. Cash also was in short supply. Material possessions were.
